Shortlisted for the 2026 Stella Prize
Geraldine Brooks – Memorial Days
Nonfiction/Memoir · Hachette Australia
About the Book
A heartrending and beautiful memoir of sudden loss and a journey towards peace from Geraldine Brooks, the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Horse.
Many cultural and religious traditions expect those who are grieving to step away from the world. In contemporary life, we are more often met with red tape and to-do lists. This is exactly what happened to Geraldine Brooks when her partner of more than three decades, Tony Horwitz – just sixty years old and, to her knowledge, vigorous and healthy – collapsed and died on a Washington, D. C. sidewalk.
After spending their early years together in conflict zones as foreign correspondents, Geraldine and Tony settled down to raise two boys on Martha’s Vineyard. The life they built was one of meaningful work, good humor, and tenderness, as they spent their days writing and their evenings cooking family dinners or watching the sun set with friends at the beach. But all of this ended abruptly when, on Memorial Day 2019, Geraldine received the phone call we all dread. The demands were immediate and many. Without space to grieve, the sudden loss became a yawning gulf.
Three years later, she booked a flight to a remote island off the coast of Australia with the intention of finally giving herself the time to mourn. In a shack on a pristine, rugged coast she often went days without seeing another person. There, she pondered the various ways in which cultures grieve and what rituals of her own might help to rebuild a life around the void of Tony’s death.
A spare and profoundly moving memoir that joins the classics of the genre, Memorial Days is a portrait of a larger-than-life man and a timeless love between souls that exquisitely captures the joy, agony, and mystery of life.
“As much as this is a grief memoir, it is also the portrait of a long and beautiful marriage. It is a writer grappling with pain and loss and showing it to us.”
– 2026 Stella Prize Judges
About the Author
Geraldine Brooks
Geraldine Brooks is an author and journalist. She has worked for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Wall Street Journal, and won the Greg Shackleton scholarship to the journalism master’s program at Columbia University. In 2006 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her novel March. Her bestselling novels include Caleb’s Crossing, People of the Book, The Secret Chord and Year of Wonders. She is also the author of acclaimed non-fiction works Nine Parts of Desire, Foreign Correspondence and Memorial Days. Her novel Horse won several awards, including the ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year Award in 2023. In 2011 she presented Australia’s prestigious Boyer Lectures, later published as The Idea of Home. In 2016 she was appointed Officer in the Order of Australia for her services to literature.
Interview with Geraldine
What are some of your earliest memories of reading?
My dad read to me at bedtime – 7 to 7.30 – religiously, every night, until I became so avid to find out what came next that I couldn’t wait and carried on reading the book – it was Enid Blyton, The Rilloby Fair Mystery – on my own. He was delighted. “That was what I was waiting for,” he said. “You can take it from here.”
Is there a book that dramatically changed your view on the world?
Annie Dillard’s A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek made me a more ardent noticer of the natural world. It is a masterclass in the art of observation.
What Stella listed book from the last 14 years do you think everyone should read?
I’m tempted to say, all of them. It is a mighty list, and because it is across genres as diverse as fiction, biography, poetry and essays, there are so many important additions to our cultural conversation. But if you wedge me in the doorjamb and insist I choose one, it would be Maggie MacKellar’s luminous memoir, “Graft: Motherhood, family and a year on the land.“ For me it’s a book that has everything: glorious writing, powerful emotion, and a peircing look into another human’s life.
What’s a quote about either your book or the role of literature in shaping culture?
“Memorial Days” is a book I wrote for myself, as a way of coming to terms with the loss of my husband Tony. It has been a bit of a surprise, and an immense gratification, that so many people have found it helpful in their own struggles with grief.
What do you hope readers take away from your book?
The relationship between the reader and the book is so personal and so different for everyone and it would be presumptuous for me to have any expectations. I’ll only say that I hope they take away something of use to them.
How are you celebrating being shortlisted?
Well, I’m not, just yet, because it’s embargoed. But I’ll let you know!
Further Reading
Reviews
“Warm and life-affirming, this brilliant book has its own restorative beauty.” – People, Book of the Month
“Wielding precise and often beautiful language and, in the most graceful way possible, pointing a way forward. A rich account of marriage and mourning.” – The Washington Post
Links
Judges’ Report
On Memorial Day 2019, Geraldine Brooks was home on Martha’s Vineyard. As she was sitting down to work on her novel Horse, she received a phone call that changed her life. Tony Horwitz, her partner of more than 35 years, had died, collapsing on the street in Washington DC. Brooks, in her retelling of this tragic event, alternates between the logistical and emotional turmoil one experiences in the immediate aftermath of a loved one dying. There are complications with health insurance and credit cards, there are children who need to be told of their father’s death, there are memorials to organise. These immediate concerns are contrasted with Brooks, three years later. She has travelled to Flinders Island to sit deeply in her grief and examine it, to look it dead in the eye. She does so in only the way a decidedly skilled writer can and the result is stunning. As much as this is a grief memoir, it is also the portrait of a long and beautiful marriage. It is a writer grappling with pain and loss and showing it to us saying, ‘this is what it feels like for me, how does it feel to you’? A gift from a writer to a reader.
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